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Boards and maker kit · Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi RP2040

8owners with an opinion
75%of verdicts positive
6/2positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and value; criticized for reliability and software.

What owners wrote

Likes it
Yeah, I just did a project at work with an RP2040 and was really impressed with the Pico SDK. It hits a sweet spot in between ST’s insanity and Arduino’s easy-but-not-powerful tradeoff. No crazy code generation, going from 0 to blinky is quick, but also going from blinky to DMA’s and interrupts is also a breeze. I will say that I think the hardware peripherals in STM32’s are miles ahead, and PIO’s don’t necessarily make up the difference.
Doesn’t like it
[edit: I retract this, I see you’ve had secretly in your possession to play with for over a year. You lucky dog. ] > I have been anti-recommending STM’s chips to everyone for a few years now due to STM’s behaviour with regards to the clearly-demonstrated-to-them hardware issues. You certainly reserve the right. However it is unclear to me why the recommendation to complaints over a months-long period is a product that has just been released. Trying to ask in a very unbiased way since as a hobbyist I’m looking into ST, Microchip, and RP2040. For my part I’ve had two out of four RP2040 come to me dead on arrival, as part of two separate boards from different vendors - one being Pi Pico from Digilent. Not a ton of experience with Microchip but I hear they have their own problems. Nobody’s perfect, the question is how do the options compare.
Likes it
Also it’s an Attiny which just isn’t a very good processor. It has 2k of ram. Compare that to my favorite microcontroller, the 32 bit RP2040, which has 264k of ram! I used to use AVR and sometimes ATTiny processors (all 8 bit) but for the last ten years I’ve exclusively used 32 bit microcontrollers and lately it’s all the RP2040. I think someone had some fun doing a small layout, but I’d really never recommend anyone use this thing. A Raspberry Pi Pico (which hosts the RP2040) is $5. That one still quite annoyingly uses Micro USB, but there’s plenty of clones that use USB-C which are also $5 each, such as this one: https://a.co/d/0d1foa5f
Likes it
Of course it's not. It's not even a match against the Rockchip boards I've been testing over the past few months: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/06/16/1800 I also have recently gotten an N100 mini-PC, which helped me put one of my ancient mini-ITX i7 machines out to pasture. Those are amazing (and are dipping under $120 with 12GB RAM and 512GB SATA SSDs). But more to the point, I think the space the original Pi occupied in hobbyist land is being eaten up by RP2040 and ESP32 MCUs, which can do everything I need I/O wise and with increasingly sophisticated software support (MicroPython is amazing for prototyping, and I even got a WaveShare RP2040 board to test that is a direct drop-in replacement for a Pi Zero)
Likes it
> Is there a way to do everything from the commandline with FOSS tools and without installing e.g. the Arduino-IDE? Yes. In fact, the official getting started guide[0] is all command-line based, with an optional chapter later on about using VS Code if you wish. I have a low volume product in production using the RP2040 and I've never once opened up any sort of GUI for developing the software or programming it. [0] https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/pico/getting-started-with...
Likes it
The RP2040 is pretty cool. I've used them in a half dozen projects now. > Raspberry Pi pulled a Henry Ford and boldly went with just one microcontroller. However, this one size fits all thing doesn't work for me. I prefer to use the least microcontroller that will do the job I need done. > There is no choice, no right sizing, but that might be OK! An RP2040 costs ~70 cents, and not all gizmos are produced by the million. The reason I like to use the wimpiest microcontroller possible is not related to monetary cost. It's related to my power budget. Most of my projects are battery-powered, and having them use the least possible amount of juice is a huge advantage. But even so, why use a $1 microcontroller when a 20 cent one will do the job equally well?
Doesn’t like it
Back a few years ago, due to chip shortages I was forced to use the RP2040 on an industrial project. No option really. The first problem with the chip is that it has zero security. Not important for hobbyist, I get it, however, for professional applications, this can be very important. Not, it isn't always about not wanting people to read your code. The application in question was a networked industrial controller with a thousand nodes. At a minimum, there's a need to ensure that the code and data cannot be altered. External memory does not allow for this. Our customer understood supply chain issues and agreed to accept the RP2040 design provided we replaced all nodes (at a cost) once a non-RP2040 node could be manufactured. Before I talk about the other problem I have to admit not having looked at the RP2040 ecosystem for about two years. No idea if this has changed. The other problem is that the RP2040 team was --again, don't know if this changed-- down-right hostile about Windows. They would respond to requests for better Windows support with moronic statement like (paraphrasing) "Just switch to Linux. It isn't that difficult". These statements were both tone-deaf and ignorant of realities out there. When you start dealing with non-trivial, non-hobby designs, there's a need for practices such as PLM (Product Lifecycle Management). When your entire engineering organization is using CAD, CAM, EDA and other tools rooted in the Windows ecosystem, you might not have…
Recommends it
I spent the latest three or four months doing embedded programming. After using extensively the ESP8266 and ESP32, now I'm quite certain I prefer big times the RP2040 (that is, the Raspberry Pico processor, but you can find it in different non-Raspberry produced development boards). The reasons are easy to summarize: 1. Vastly superior C SDK, and even the MicroPython support appears to have an edge. 2. Fantastic documentation, even if in PDF form, which makes a bit less accessible for us and especially for LLMs training data crawlers. In general LLMs know a great deal more about ESP stuff than the RP2040. 3. Almost every RP2040 can be overclocked to 400Mhz and work stable, and I could say basically every RP2040 can be stable at 350Mhz, so when comparing performances, account for this. 4. Very smart hardware capabilities: state machines for programmable pins (PIOs), great DMA support, hardware interpolators. 5. High quality hardware, and if you don't need the version with wireless, the cost is still quite reasonable. 3/4 euros/dollars per piece. 6. When you need the "W" one, the wireless chip the Pico uses has its own ARM processor, so you continue to have the two RP2040 cores spare for your application. 7. Memory mapped flash with execute in place. You can read from 0x1000000+offset just deferencing a pointer and that's it, you access your flash. 8. More GPIOs available. The big disadvantage of the RP2040: No SPI RAM support. At this point many ESP32 boards have built-in SP…
Recommends itHasn’t owned it
Do this course https://github.com/henki-robotics/robotics_essentials_ros2 Totally free, don't need to buy anything just a computer. I've been designing electrical hardware for robots for the last 4 years for a big corporation and I can tell you, the fun and money is in the software but having another skill is awesome. Robotics is a place where multiple fields converge and if you find a good team they will help you to grow. Embedded is the adjacent field after you complete the course. Maybe something like zephyr project. If you want to get you feet wet with mechanical. Buy a A1 mini and play with onshape (www.onshape.com) to design your first pieces, supports for the motors or the board, try create you own gripper. As for the electrical engineering, is the one with most pitfalls and the most expensive. A wrong voltage will release the magical smoke and is another 30$ for a board. Tread carefully. Start with the RP2040 or the RP2350, they are cheap and well documented. This skill will evolve hand by hand with the embedded coding. Start small. Learn about H-bridge and brushed motors before doing the jump to the bigboys and FOC control with brushless. Get a cheap soldering iron. If you can, a clone of the JBC C245 tips. Is the most versatile and you can find stuff in alie xpress for 45 or 50$ and would be similar to the tools you will find in the field without breaking the bank. Search for ROS meetups. I could point you to some depending where in the world you are. And above al…
Likes itHasn’t owned it
It's just easier for people with less soldering experience, all the tricky SMD parts are already installed for you. Especially now that QMK has shifted from AVR to more powerful and readily available ARM chips like the RP2040, which are often only available in packages that are difficult to hand-solder. Plus designing a keyboard around the Pro Micro means you can use the same PCB for wired and wireless builds.
Likes itHasn’t owned it
for context: just upgraded to pi 5 after owning the original for over 11 years and still in service! i get that for most people reading this, rpi has been about a cheap computing platform to run containers at home. personally, i thought all that was a byproduct of a larger goal of making computing accessible. however, past five years seems to me that the foundation is side-stepped for commercial ambitions. i think that rp2040 is an excellent platform and evolution of promoting tinkering. every other design decisions no longer seem aligned with the goal of accessibility. till this day, unless you live in cambridge or near a micro center, getting one is still down to trusting resellers. before the design would go out of the way for compatibility (see composite video), and the only things that would stand out was stuff like hardware codec licensing. now, there are so many weird decisions, like micro-hdmi and needing a specific power supply and cooling to use the latest pi optimally (i had an issue with usb boot out of the box while using a standard 18w charger). whether you put it all down to inflation, getting started from scratch with rpi might still be remotely in the ballpark of buying a toy if you go for several year old models. when i bought my first pi, i was too scared to try its gpio pins because of the fear of bricking it. now with the new one and the official case that hides them away, you can forget tinkering with that. now it seems that rpi is now more aligned to ou…
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
The RP2040 isn't a very compelling microcontroller though. The only interesting thing about it is the programmable peripherals, but we've seen that before, e.g. from XMOS and in practice the protocols & peripherals you're going to use 99.9% of the time are completely standard - I2C, SPI, I2S, UART, counters/PWM, etc. For the rare case you need something custom and high speed there are really cheap FPGAs now. The ESP32 supports all of those protocols and Wifi and Bluetooth, and it has low power sleep modes. And there are RISC-V versions which is quite nice from a a warm fuzzy point of view. I think RPi still has a place for hobby electronics projects where you want GPIO. I don't think people are going to use it as a standard computer (desktop / media server / etc) though.
Likes itHasn’t owned it
A Rockchip RK3588S with an NPU TPU and an RTC battery is a good idea for safer complex SBC applications. From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007967 : > The RTk.GPIO is a Plug & Play USB Device which adds 28 x Raspberry Pi style GPIO pins to your computer An RP2040 (RPi Pico) is also a USB 2x20 GPIO, with a uf2 bootloader and upgradeable firmware. Conda-forge builds arm64 Linux and now MacOS packages from feedstocks. There's usually not a maintained arm64 copy of containers though, so you must build containers yourself with or for ARM64 with cross-compilation from a faster build machine, which distrobox makes really simple. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505448 ... https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_...